[Watch] Extremism And Murders In Bangladesh Threaten Its Endeavors To Become A Secular State

In 2010, the Bangladesh Supreme Court restored secularism as one of the basic tenets of the Constitution and Islam as the state religion. There has been tug of war about making it a secular state however events suggests otherwise.

The editor of Bangladesh’s only LGBT magazine, Xulhaz Mannan, and his gay rights activist friend, Tanay Majumdar were brutally murdered in April 2016, AFM Rezaul Karim Siddique, an English professor at a university was hacked to death the same moth.
There have also been attacks on members of religious minorities including Shia, Sufi and Ahmadi Muslims, Christians and Hindus. In Bangladesh, if you’re a blogger, you’ll be considered as an atheist, which therefore makes it OK to kill you by some fringe extremist elements.

Although two people have been sentenced to death for murdering Bangladesh blogger, the minorities are vulnerable to such attacks.

Despite the attempts to become a secular state, extremism is well practiced and has hold in policy making and provoking youth to commit heinous crimes against humanity.

The question arises; will Bangladesh be able to protect secularism, one of the basic tenets of the Constitution and control extremism.